Also, some of these names remind me of this

https://wolfdo.gg/notes/aio85w7twrmqmd5l

We're not going to have a one and done chat/social program and know what, it should be that way. We shouldn't allow another one to become a behemoth that then turns into a perfect honeypot.

What really needs to rise to the top again is pidgin

I've checked out Stoat and Fluxer. Both seem like they would be the easiest to convince your friends to move.

Fluxer in particular seems a little ahead of Stoat with screen sharing and video calls. Both have the main Discord features, text and voice channels, etc.

I'm rooting for Fluxer now though because they're AGPLv3 without a CLA. So the code will be free forever.

I tried out Matrix as well with Element. It was a complete disaster. The few friends I convinced to try it hated it, the UI was buggy AF, the whole the thing was slow, and we couldn't even see our chats because something, something encryption. They quickly retreated back to Discord.

Slack has the same issues as Discord, so that's automatically discarded.

Mattermost and Zulip I don't know too much about. I think Mattermost is open core, which is lame. So that's out.

Really, the only options are Stoat or Fluxer.

There are federated alternatives like Movim that would eliminate the chance of that happening, just like Lemmy/Piefed do. It also offers proper E2EE.

It's missing a couple features compared to Discord, but the dev is actively working on fixing that. And since it's also GPL licensed, it can never be co-opted by corpos.

I’d guess Slack is wildly more profitable than discord

I don't know when you tried it, but Element has come a long way. I had an experience simple to yours when I first tried it but now it's pretty functional. We don't do much with video, but so far everyone I've convinced to start switching from Discord has successfully switched to Matrix and only one of them has had any trouble.

Preventing segmentation or centralization? Apologize, it's early and I'm bleary eyed.

Preventing it from becoming a centralized honey pot.

Thank ya. I suspect we'll see a big swing of people leaving come March.

Movim looks quite cool, thanks for sharing it!

I really don’t understand what IRC was falling short of.

Fluxer in particular seems a little ahead of Stoat with screen sharing and video calls

That is surprising since Fluxer started last month (and its wikipedia article was started today) while Stoat has been around since 2021 (it was called Revolt until it renamed last year).

Stoat does have voice and video and screensharing in their desktop+web clients at least, but as of this comment in August it still wasn't implemented in mobile clients. And also it wasn't/isn't enabled on their flagship instance due to the high cost of running a free video relay.

I’m rooting for Fluxer now though because they’re AGPLv3 without a CLA. So the code will be free forever.

Stoat is also AGPLv3; do they require copyright assignment? From a quick look I didn't see any indication that they do.

spaces, persistent voice chats, screensharing... discord grew a lot from their origins as a teamspeak alternative and it tried to become an 'everything' app until they were stretched too thin

Ah, yeah. I guess he created the official repo for this in January of this year. According to him, he's been working on this for 5 years. The very first commit he has in the repo is huge. It seems like he already had most of the code working already.

Personally, I don't think that's weird. I have several projects in private git repos. If I were to make any of those public, I would for sure copy stuff over to a new repo and ditch the old one.

Stoat does have voice and video and screensharing in their desktop+web clients at least, but as of this comment in August it still wasn’t implemented in mobile clients

Ah, I didn't know. Cool!

And also it wasn’t/isn’t enabled on their flagship instance due to the high cost of running a free video relay.

This makes sense. They need more money to keep the project going. That's why I don't totally mind Fluxer selling Plutonium. Open Source can't (fully) run on hopes and dreams. Actually, seems like Stoat doesn't have a donate button anywhere. Even just getting enough donations to rent a faster VPS would help. The main instance is slow. Which I understand why. It's just unfortunately that if someone compares them with Fluxer, Fluxer is gonna be faster. :/

Stoat is also AGPLv3; do they require copyright assignment?

Yeah, Stoat is also AGPLv3! I think they required a CLA when they were revolt. But not sure about today.

(Disregard if you already know but)

Pidgin is (primarily) an XMPP client. There are a handful of excellent ones now and they're all intercompatible. There's been a tonne of recent experimentation and expansion of the protocol for modern use.

By that i meant an app that communicates with everything